


The man in the well

by Ideasofmarch



Series: There's a fine line between eccentric and absolutely bonkers [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, I tagged it anyway, Immortal Merlin (Merlin), Immortality, M/M, Post-Canon, Sad, Temporary Character Death, and i kinda describe drowning, be warned, brief contemplation of suicide, but he's like immortal so it doesn't work anyway, like its not even that graphic but i don't wanna like accidentally hurt someone so, so if anyone has any water related trauma, the consequences of immortality, the rest of it is more upbeat i promise, this is definitely the darkest bit of the series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:48:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24747859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ideasofmarch/pseuds/Ideasofmarch
Summary: Six hundred years after Arthur, Merlin is making his way through a little town in the middle of nowhere when an angry spirit chases him into an abandoned well.In all honesty, he could've escaped the well ages ago. But the darkness was almost comforting, and after six hundred years of bland light, Merlin was weak.-This is a prologue, kind of, to the first work in this series. though it is technically the beginning so start from here if you really want to. Basically it's just me filling in the blanks as to what Merlin was up to while Arthur took a nap at the bottom of a lake.
Relationships: Just mentioned tho - Relationship, Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Series: There's a fine line between eccentric and absolutely bonkers [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1785826
Comments: 21
Kudos: 209





	The man in the well

**Author's Note:**

> Hello guys!!  
> ngl i meant to post this days ago but my computer died on me (again!).  
> I finally got her working again :D so imma be quick and post this before Darla (that's what i named my computer btw) dies again.  
> This is definitely the most depressing bit of the series, but i'm not super good at writing heart achy stuff so just bear with me - i tried.  
> Hope you like it,  
> IdeasOfMarch

_The man in the well_

Merlin hadn’t meant to fall in a well.

He hadn’t meant to stay down there either.

But, like most things in his godforsaken life, it just _happened_ to him.

It had been somewhere around the end of the middle ages.

Truly, a dreadful time to be alive for absolutely anyone. Magic was going through a bit of a dry spell, no pun intended, and the earth had decided to fuck everyone over as well. So not only was there no magical relief for the crops and illnesses, besides Merlin of course, but there was also smallpox and droughts.

Kings and peasants alike were essentially suffering their ways through the years – though kings, at least, had bellies full of food so perhaps one party was suffering significantly more than the other. Merlin wished he’d know that there was actually people populating the rest of the earth, he might have stollen a boat and hung out with the Mayans while Europe finished going through… this.

Point is: the well incident was _not_ his fault.

He’d been minding his own business, as he’d been doing for the past six hundred years, mind you. Human connection was very trying on the soul, and he just – _couldn’t_. Not right now at least, probably not for another six hundred years.

The town he was wondering through, they’d been having a particularly terrible harvest. And Merlin was just giving their soil a little bit of a boost when he spotted a lake.

It wasn’t _that_ lake.

But it was similar enough to give him pause. He’d stumbled over, leaving tendrils of his magic to do its work on the ground. Merlin had only intended to look out over the lake, perhaps dip his feet in, when a stray root caused him to go tumbling face first into the water.

The local kelpie was simply being entirely unreasonable about the whole situation.

The scary water lady had shrieked, quickly turning into a scary water horse before chasing him straight through the town.

And it’s not like he expected the towns people to help, no one could really expect much from their fellow men during hard times such as this, but more than a passing glance would have been nice.

The kelpie chased him straight into the old abandoned well, where he promptly cracked his skull open and bled out.

It didn’t stick.

Of course it didn’t.

Nothing is ever so easy in Merlins life.

He woke up days later – might’ve even been weeks if the dried blood was anything to go by – with a splitting headache and stiff limbs. The kelpie, thank the gods, was no where to be found. She had probably – and rightly so – assumed he’d met his demise and gone back to her lake, primed and ready to chase the next poor sap to trip into her waters.

 _At least,_ he’d thought _, At least I haven’t drowned_.

Drowning, truly, it was awful. Merlin hated it with a burning passion – he hated it more than being burnt, even. And that one hurt like a mother, regeneration took years, painful, tiring years where he lay conscious and hungry while his very essence rebuilt itself. Still, nothing terrified him more than a watery, if temporary, grave.

Because drowning…

He’d drowned the first time.

It was merely twenty three years after Arthur. He’d been even more of a mess then, drunken and brooding in the back of caverns. Merlin was not the brooding type – too skinny, he’d been told, he couldn’t quite pull it off – but he’d been giving it his very best, back then.

Now he just wandered. Never staying in one place too long, sleeping more often in the branches of a sturdy tree than a warm bed.

He’d outgrown the need for human contact.

Or, at least, he’d convinced himself he had.

But back then, when he’d been a sixty five year old war veteran who looked like a baby faced twenty something. The brush of shoulders had been enough to keep him sane, even as he craved an embrace.

He can’t remember what he’d done to offend the men, but it must have been something awful because the next thing he knew he’d been shackled in iron and dragged outside.

His magic, dulled as it was from the alcohol and lack of proper sleep, immediately began corroding the iron.

It wasn’t enough.

The men threw him in a nearby lake and he couldn’t have done a damn thing about it.

Truth be told, Merlin had been contemplating death for a while now. Perhaps a toxic plant combined with a sleeping drought, he wouldn’t feel a damn thing. But each time the thought of Arthur put him off.

He’d awake, one day.

And Merlin would be there for him, he _had_ to be there.

He’d struggled in the iron chains, trying with all his might to stay afloat.

 _For_ _Arthur_ , he’d chanted in his mind, _for_ _Arthur_.

But the chains were heavy and the alcohol made him slow. Eventually his aching muscles could kick no longer, it had felt as if every muscle in his body was replaced with lead, and no amount of pushing could force them to move.

He’d gasped for air, but water poured into his mouth instead. Even as he sank further into the depths of the lake, Merlin kicked and wiggled and writhed. He spluttered, more water rushed in. Something ripped in his chest and the pain forced his mouth open.

It was an uphill battle – in truth he’d lost it the moment his feet hit the water.

Merlin could feel it, the water filling his lungs and tearing at the delicate tissue. And then…

And then it stopped hurting. It was almost peaceful.

Is this what Arthur felt? Could he have even felt anything, the state he’d been in?

But it wasn’t peace. Because the pain had stopped, yes. He was moments away from death, he knew that, nothing hurt that close to the end. But all he could feel was an overwhelming sense of sadness.

What would Arthur think? When he woke up, years from now in a new world, only to hear that Merlin had died cold and alone, a drunken fool. Would he even hear of Merlins death? It was an unremarkable one, and Merlin himself was not truly anyone of note, not anymore.

He didn’t know which thought hurt more: that Arthur would be disgusted by his death, or that he wouldn’t even know.

There was no time to contemplate it.

Darkness, the kind so vast and unknowable that he could immediately differentiate between _it_ and the nothingness of the bottom of the lake, swirled around him and engulfed him.

He woke up face down on the lake shore, the iron chains lay in fragments around him. Almost as soon as he’d regained consciousness his body was expelling lake water, all of it rushing up and out his mouth so fast it burned. The water, towards the end, was bloody and filled with chunks of what might have been his lungs.

Merlin had made the wise decision to not look to closely at those chunks.

He’d sat by that lake for what felt like an eternity. Processing the fact that yes, he’d died, and no, he hadn’t _stayed_ dead. He learnt, too, that while the ache in his belly grew and grew, starvation never really set in.

He was immortal, it seemed, in every sense of the word.

He’d stood up, months after the incident, his bones offering only a weak protest, and then he’d avoided water like the plague for the next one hundred years. Even when he visited Arthur at the lake, he stood as far back as he could.

Then he’d drowned a second time, and a third – by the sixth time he found that avoiding water was nonsensical. The fear, though, the absolute hatred of water filling his lungs and blocking out the pathways for air – that never went away.

It probably never would.

So yeah, traumatic brain injury beat drowning any day.

Merlin had been woozy for days after he’d fallen down the well. He couldn’t stand, he could barely even remember his own name – the consequences of having your brain smeared across the dirty floor.

By the time he could properly collect his thoughts, could string enough words together in a long forgotten language to propel himself out of this hole – Merlin found he couldn’t be bothered.

What was up there for him, really? A scary demon horse-lady? A world that didn’t need him, didn’t even know – or care – that he still existed? An eternity of waiting?

So he’d sat back down, lent his still aching head on the rough wall, and closed his eyes.

The dark was not so bad. It slunk around him like an affectionate cat, giving him a safe place to… well, reminisce.

He thought of Camelot. He thought of his first day there, challenging Arthur – god he’d been such a prat, at the start, maybe a little towards the middle too – to a duel, meeting Kilgharrah, meeting Gwen. He laughed to himself, remembering all those stupid hunts the knights used to drag him on, all the silly ways they used to egg each other on – all the silly ways they used to egg _him_ on.

He thought of Morgana. Sending a silent apology to the heavens for the ways he’d failed her, for when he’d stayed silent and allowed her to be deceived, for how he’d played a part in driving her to insanity.

He thought of Gwen. She’d died an old women – the queen of an heirless, crumbling kingdom. He regrets not being there for her.

Mostly, though, he thinks of Arthur.

The golden haired prince he’d been. Stuck up and arrogant and so, _so_ _good_. Merlin thought of all those nights polishing armor and mucking out the stables, the old feelings of irritation brought a smile to his lips. He thought of Arthur, disobeying direct orders to save Merlin’s life. He remembered the feel of Arthur’s hand wrapped around his wrist, his shoulder, his waist.

Merlin thought about the king he had become – pride, old as it was, bubbled in his chest. He thinks of long nights strategizing, passing out in each other’s arms. He can almost hear Gwen soft ‘tsk’, can almost feel her tucking a blanket over the two of them, bestowing a kiss on each of their foreheads before making her way to her own room.

He can almost feel Arthur’s shoulder pressed into his side, softly snoring in his ear.

Arthur always denied the fact that he snored, never mind that Merlin heard him do it every night.

He smiled in the dark.

Merlin had loved him, gods above had Merlin loved him.

Ten years was not enough.

Not when they were supposed to have a lifetime.

Silent tears slipped down his cheeks, catching on his chin. Merlin cried, then, for the first time since Arthurs body disappeared into the lake. He cried ugly, terrible tears until his body ran out of water, choking out heaving sobs instead.

It might have been days, maybe weeks, before his heart stopped aching so terribly in his chest.

It still hurt, his heart had been cut open with a jagged sword, it would never fully heal, but the pain was manageable. It was dull enough that he could take a breath and not immediately scream it back out.

Then a bucket hit him on the head.

“Mother!” A voice screamed, Merlin winced at the sound. “Mother, come quick!”

“Timothee! I’ve told you a _hundred_ times, that is _not_ the right well!”

“Mother, there’s a man in the well!”

Right, that was his que.

With a few whispered words Merlin was thrown bodily out of the well, landing awkwardly in front of a shocked little boy and his flabbergasted mother.

“Hello.” He’d said. Though his voice was raspy from years of disuse.

Mother and son ran screaming.

Merlin blinked.

He supposed he did look like the vision of an eldritch abomination. He knew, when he went years without eating or drinking his body looked a hop, skip, and a jump away from being a decayed corpse, and his eyes were gold – they wouldn’t stop glowing until his body could keep itself running without magic.

The boy and his mother being frightened was inevitable.

Merlin sighed.

He was out of his well, and for the first time in many, many, _many_ years – he didn’t actively wish he were buried along with the rest of his people.

Arthur _would_ wake up one day.

And Merlin would be there, He’d help Arthur adjust to the new world, be there every step of the way with years’ worth of stories and tales and experience.

 _But_ _first_ , Merlin thought, clutching his concaved belly, _food_.

**Author's Note:**

> And there we go, i don't know when i'll get the next bit up - i'm going back to school in like a week so i'm actually attempting to get my shit together (unlikely but a girl can dream). lmk what you think. :)


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